Michigan Amtrak passenger service to Chicago to be upgraded to 110 mph

Many Michiganders enjoy travelling to and from Chicago by train. The terminal there is near many attractions for business and leisure activities. People who go by train donít have to drive through traffic and find adequate parking. Parking overnight is like having an extra guest in your hotel room. Public transportation is handy 24 hours a day and taxies are easy to get and not that expensive. During the eight-day Thanksgiving holiday season, the three Amtrak corridors handled 4.1 million passenger-miles. Currently, Amtrak operates three Wolverine round trips from Chicago to Pontiac daily.

According to the magazine, Trains, March 2014, pages 22-23, accelerated passenger service between Pontiac and Chicago will be completed by 2016. Segments are already handling traffic at 110 mph. The route will include Pontiac, Troy, West Detroit, Detroit, Dearborn, Ann Arbor, Jackson, Battle Creek, Dowagiac, Niles, New Buffalo, Porter and Chicago. New stations are under construction at Troy, at $6.3 million, and Dearborn, at $28 million. The anticipated time from Detroit to Chicago will be four hours, an hour less than that of the Twilight Limited of the 1950s.

Trains at Dowagiac began running at 110 mph in February 2012. Existing equipment is capable of 125 mph. In 1976, the bankrupt Penn Central gave Amtrak the trackage from Porter to Kalamazoo. The state of Michigan purchased 135 miles of track from Norfolk Southern in 2013, using $347 million of high speed grant money for acquisition and track improvement. In the 15 weeks before Thanksgiving, track gangs replaced 132,000 ties and upgraded 16,000 feet of track. Amtrak signal and track people will take over maintenance and dispatching of the stateís trackage as the Incremental Train Control System signaling extends east from Kalamazoo.

All road crossings must have gates when trains operate at more than 90 mph. The state started in the 1990s by closing one public and twelve private crossings in Comstock Township east of Kalamazoo. Additional track upgrades, grade-crossing work, turnout replacement and signal work will continue for the next two years. Many improvements in the Chicago area are underway to handle passenger trains more efficiently. Amtrak plans to add new bilevel cars and locomotives for the high-speed service.

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Michiganís government should insure proper funding for the remaining work. Encouraging train travel will reduce pollution and decrease road congestion. There are many things to see and do in Chicago, and getting there will become much more tolerable and enjoyable.

Michiganís progress notwithstanding, the nation as a whole lags most industrial nations in high-speed rail. France, much of Europe, Japan, China and once-underdeveloped countries are interlaced with passenger rail traffic that regularly exceed 186 mph. China has made enormous strides in enhancing capacity into the future. It has trains, such as the magnetic-levitation train from the airport to downtown Shanghai, with a top speed of 268 mph. By 2015, China will have over 11 thousand miles of high-speed lines and will increase this to about 25 thousand miles for continued growth.

In the US, the Boston-Washington, DC corridor currently can handle traffic from 110 to 160 mph, with improvements in the planning stages, including extensions to Atlanta. Other similar corridors being planned include one from Chicago to St. Louis, Chicago to Omaha, Chicago to Minneapolis/St. Paul to Duluth, one from Vancouver, BC to Eugene, OR, one from Sacramento to San Diego, CA, and another from Orlando to Miami, in Florida. Other segments are being considered in Arizona, Colorado, and Texas. None of these will connect with each other.

There is no national strategy. There is a myth that more than three hours on a train will not attract passengers, though in many cases, considering time from an airport to downtown, many routes would get passengers to their destination more quickly by train. Further, many travel between cities, not the whole route, end to end. Politics also plays its role: there is no will to address the major problems of our infrastructure because ďit would cost too much.Ē

The real cost is in not doing some of these expensive projects, because we will be less able to compete in the world economy. We must rationally determine where we must be in twenty or thirty years, increase federal and state revenues to plan, implement and complete necessary projects, bringing in the private sector to pull its fair share. The alternative is to continue our stagnation.